Ensuring you can play older formats such as VHS will only get more difficult as time goes on, and the relative fragility of tape means it might not survive a mechanical failure. You'd be wise to transfer your irreplaceable home movies to a more ...

Easy VHS to DVD's inability to trim Mpeg-2 movies is an oversimplification, while Video Capture would be more versatile if you could stop it downscaling for iPods. Still, the real benefit of both is that the hardware does the conversion on the fly, so ...

The latest version of iLife 09 doesn't have any new applications, and two of its existing components, iDVD and iWeb have been virtually untouched. But the improvements to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand mean that there's plenty to get excited about

Overall, then, despite the apparent stagnation of iWeb and iDVD, the updates to GarageBand, iMovie and iPhoto make iLife 09 a very worthwhile upgrade indeed

Toast is the best-known Mac application for creating CDs, DVDs and, since version 9, Blu-ray movies, though you need to purchase a plug-in. Almost a year on, Roxio has updated Toast and the suite of applications bundled with it. Little has changed on ...

The regular edition adds some valuable new features, but you may begrudge the upgrade price of 64.99-plus so soon after Toast 9. Its worth hinges on how many of its new features appeal to you. What's most disappointing is that new users are asked to ...

Phase One is probably better known as a maker of high-end digital camera backs for medium-format cameras, but it has an equally good reputation for its Capture One Raw conversion software

As much as we like Pro, it's not all quite as rosy as we had hoped. The new Colour Editor promises plenty of control, but the learning curve is pretty steep. What's more, the heavily touted tethered camera support is limited to Phase One backs and ...

The premise of Live Interior is simple: it helps you visualise interior design projects from home and domestic situations, to commercial and business environments

Live Interior 3D Pro is certainly better than its predecessor and the new features make it a much slicker product, but wall drawing still needs improving

With its latest upgrade to Cinema 4D, Maxon has introduced a whole new range of very useful and much-needed features

All in all, this is at least as big an upgrade as R10.5 and should be an automatic upgrade for anyone with a licence

Blow Up 2 is Alien Skin's latest foray into the impossible Photoshop dream - the ability to enlarge an image without losing quality or sharpness. Bearing in mind that it's impossible to put data back when it wasn't there to start with, Blow Up 2 makes ...

So is Blow Up 2 that much better than straightforward enlargement in Photoshop? Yes, significantly so. As a one-step solution, the results are crisper, more lifelike, and more finely detailed - within limits, of course. You can't expect enlargements ...

The first thing you notice about this application is its redesigned interface. As we said in our beta preview, this is a radical departure from all previous versions and gives it a truly modern look. But what's also remarkable about this is how ...

If you're an existing QuarkXPress user, this is what you probably thought would never happen - an upgrade easily good enough to keep you this side of the fence. If you're an InDesign user will all this be enough to tempt you to QuarkXPress? That's a ...

OnOne Software's Plug-In Suite 4 is the company's latest set of plug-ins for Photoshop and includes updates of Genuine Fractals, as well as some new tools

Plug-In Suite 4 is an odd collection, and the chances are that there are one or two tools here that a Photoshop user would find useful. But as a bundle, it's a somewhat disparate selection, that would serve to confuse rather than aid novice Photoshop ...